Samir Amin has argued that the challenges which Africa is facing today should be put in the longer time frame of the continuous construction by the imperialist centres of an asymmetric dominating and dominated relationship with the peripheries of the three continents. In that respect, the contemporary new stage of imperialist monopoly capital sees Africa almost exclusively as a source of natural resources to be plundered.

Final Project Report -- London School of Economics and Political Science, UK, with Birzeit University, Palestine

by Dr Michael Mason and Dr Ziad Mimi

This study investigates the climate-related vulnerabilities of agricultural communities in (post)occupation environments. The three study areas reflect distinct stages of occupational control within the same regional watershed (Jordan Basin). They encompass: protracted military occupation (West Bank), annexation (Golan Heights) and post-occupation (southern Lebanon). That the coercive control regime for all three areas is, or was, administered by the Israeli state (military or civil administration) creates a governance linkage for comparative analysis. This research project is the first comparative study of climate vulnerability in conditions of (post)occupation.

The Ghor, also Ghawr (‘depression’), in the southern Levant refers to the region of the Jordan Valley and the Dead Sea, part of the Great Rift Valley. Ghor al-Safi is located on a fertile alluvial plain at the mouth of Wadi al-Hasa near the lower end of the Dead Sea. It is one of several communities along the eastern Dead Sea shore which are collectively referred to as the southern Ghor(s). Historically, the year-round residents of the hot and malaria-infested Ghor were considered a distinct group by both pastoral nomads and farmers of the higher grounds. They were, and still are, commonly referred to as Ghorani (also Ghawarneh), a term which invokes strong derogatory connotations related to their darker skin tone and underprivileged economic status.

Since the 1960’s, the Syrian state built large scale irrigation schemes on the Euphrates river. The Al-Assad Establishment is one of the most important of these large scale projects. From 1980 onward, it was operated as a state farm. Its creation profundly transformed the pattern of agricultural production but also the social structures and everyday life of farmers.

We are very happy to start off what we hope will be a long series of reviews of books of interest on thimar with François Ireton's review of الفلاحين في مسر كبار الملاك و -- Kibâr al mullâk wa-l fallâhîn fî Misr, 1837-1952 -- by Raouf Abbas and Assem EI-Dessouky

The seminar brought together a group of researchers investigating agriculture, labour and environment, to provide feedback on the first cut of documentary film by Ray Bush (Leeds University) and Habib Ayeb (Université-Paris 8) on their fieldwork in Tunisia and Egypt in 2013, as well as to share their own research experiences.

We have uploaded three older articles about Yemen and Syria by Martha Mundy. Two are in available in Arabic and one in English. They are filed under "agrarian history", "Land Tenure", and "Water and Irrigation".

Email subscription

New Video

Latest updates on facebook

Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike 3.0 Unported License